Hi. I am Jim Bernardin and I had a lot to do with with making Chevy magazine and newspaper ads, commercials, catalogs, and sales promotion stuff for 35 years. People like collecting many of the pieces and they are available mostly as tear sheets from old magazines and still existing catalogs. But nobody ever says anything about who did them and why. That is information I will try to provide. I hope it will make owning an old Chevy ad even more fun.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

'70 Chevelle SS 396 Magazine Ad

CHEVELLE SS 396. OTHER CARS WISH WE'D KEEP IT THIS WAY.

This was quite a car with the big 396 engine and I thought this would be a great way to show how powerful it really was. We were on an "experimental shoot" in California. Chevrolet gave us the new prototype cars to photograph without any layout approval. We took two creative teams--I was one along with Bill Graefen for copy and Warren Winstanley for photography. Tony Longo was the other art director I took along and he had Jim Hartzell for copy and Dennis Gripentrog for photography. I insisted we have as many ideas for photographs as possible before the shoot began. That was important because we had a lot of expense going on with the two crews, the guys from Chevrolet with the vans full of cars, and a whole bunch of account guys that were responsible for the security. This was one of a bunch of ideas I had sketched out on letter size yellow pads. They were not layouts but in this case a box like car with ropes around it. Warren had one of his assistants go to the shipping docks and buy the biggest rope he could find. We fashioned the stakes from fence posts and looped the rope through the car, Then we messed up the earth behind the rear wheels to make it look like the car was trying to get away. That doesn't show very well but it doesn't matter. Two views were made, this one and one from dead ahead. The other view was used in some promotion material. I have seen this ad in most every book that deals with Muscle Cars or high performance cars from this time. You can buy a beautiful copy of this picture as well as the front view from the General Motors site. Go to Chevrolet and then to photos of Chevelle. I don't have some of the other pictures with me but there are several more done this way. One was done on the Screen Gems Lot with a very big bright red light hidden under the hood and glowing down on to the pavement even though it was parked in a neighborhood. Also available from GM. Another had a guy as the driver that looked like a WW One fighter pilot and on the door just below the drivers window were a bunch of cut outs pasted like planes shot down. There were several Mustangs (the horse not the car), the Plymouth Barracuda (again not the car), and a few Cobras. I made the stickers before we left Detroit. It made a terrific picture but I couldn't get it sold. Still have a print of it and I'll show it to you when I get back to Michigan. Dick Wingerson wrote the copy for this ad. Thanks for the correction, Dick.